June 30th, 2010

Thank to our brand new plugin support, and a selection of 3 plugins (all bundled by default) you can now keep 99,9% of spammers out of your web applications.

What are this magical plugins?

Bad Behavior

Coming from the WordPress ecosystem, Bad Behavior act as a first line of defense.

It pioneered an HTTP fingerprinting approach. Instead of looking at the spam, it looks at the spammer. Bad Behavior analyzes the HTTP headers, IP address, and other metadata regarding the request to determine if it is spammy or malicious.

Bad Behavior deny access to your site to tons of bad bots, spammers, harvesters and other suspicious agents. As of today, we advise to always have this plugin activated.

Akismet

Also coming from the WordPress ecosystem, Akismet will help you protect your blog/forum from comment spam. How does it works?

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.

To activate Akismet, you first have to get an API key. As of today, e recommend to switch this plugin on if you have a public blog with comments open, or a forum open to everyone.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a system, originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University that uses CAPTCHA to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots attempting to access restricted areas.

In La Distribution, the plugin add captchas on registration forms to prevent automated account creation. To activate it, you first have to get an api key on the reCAPTCHA website. We recommend to switch this plugin on when you allow user registration, which is not the case by default.

Conclusion

What’s great, is that this plugins are only to be configured once, and will then work for every applications installed on your website.

As technology distributors, we think it’s our mission to give the best tools to our users, in this case helping them to protect efficiently their website from the plague that spam is. And if that was not good enough, we’re also currently developing new innovative solutions, that we’ll bundle in future versions of La Distribution. But that’s another story.